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Jack Kerouac play to premiere

By Mark Kennedy AP Entertainment Writer

Monday, March 12, 2012 5:01 PM

Kerouac

NEW YORK  Jack Kerouacs only full-length play will be staged for the first time this fall.

Merrimack Repertory Theatre and the University of Massachusetts Lowell said Monday  on what would have been Kerouacs 90th birthday  that they will produce the three-act play called Beat Generation in the novelists hometown of Lowell, Mass.

The premiere of the play  a staged reading for eight performances only  will be the centerpiece of the 2012 Jack Kerouac Literary Festival, which will be held Oct. 10 through Oct. 14.

Kerouac wrote Beat Generation  which draws on his life and those of other Beat writers, including Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg  in 1957, the same year his classic On the Road was released.

He tried to build interest for Beat Generation in the theater world, contacting such people as Lillian Hellman and Marlon Brando, but he failed and set the manuscript aside. Kerouac died in 1969. The manuscript was found in a warehouse in 2005.

This is a moment of literary and theatrical history, said Charles Towers, artistic director of the Merrimack Repertory Theatre, which also produced a stage adaptation of Kerouacs Lowell-set romance, Maggie Cassidy.

Kerouacs other books include Doctor Sax, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums and his final great work, Big Sur. His first published novel was The Town and the City.

The authors first actual novel, the 158-page The Sea is My Brother, was published Monday, in honor of the writers birthday. The work, written when Kerouac was 21, is the tale of two young men serving on a voyage from Boston to Greenland.